Actually the late Prof Leo Breiman expanded this metaphor into the statistical modelling world. The two cultures being the explanatory and predictive modelling

Actually the late Prof Leo Breiman expanded this metaphor into the statistical modelling world. The two cultures being the explanatory and predictive modelling folk. The explanatory modelling culture (that he calls the data modelling culture) being those that first come up with a guess of how the data is generated and then try to test that hypothesis using goodness of fit measures, and the predictive modelling culture (he calls algorithmic modelling culture) being the modern machine learning researchers that are purely interested in predictive power. The full essay is here: https://projecteuclid.org/journals/statistical-science/volume-16/issue-3/Statistical-Modeling--The-Two-Cultures-with-comments-and-a/10.1214/ss/1009213726.full https://projecteuclid.org/journals/statistical-science/volum...